Chapter 33
AXEL
She’s right. The ceiling in this room is forty-seven too.
I've been staring at it for twenty minutes.
How long does a reunion take? What does it look like when it goes well? Does she cry first or does he? Does Luca pull her in or does he stand there being stubborn until she breaks the distance herself?
I know Luca. I know him better than almost any person alive.
I've sat across from him in negotiations that lasted sixteen hours.
I've watched him bury men he loved without changing his expression.
I've seen him make decisions that would hollow out lesser people and walk away from them without a backward glance.
But I've also seen him look at Aurora.
Even at the end, even in that room when everything was burning down, before the anger took over completely — he looked at her the way men only look at the people they would actually die for. The kind of love that doesn't consult the brain before it acts.
He'll see her, and he'll melt, I think. He has to. Because if he doesn't, if he lets pride override his love for his daughter—his daughter who has been missing him every single day—
I stop that thought before it becomes something I have to act on from a hospital bed.
She needs him. That's the only thing that matters right now. Not the history between Luca and me, not the seven years, not the fists in his office. Just Aurora, who forgives too readily and loves too completely and deserves to have her father in her life.
I would burn every bridge I have left standing to make that happen.
You're completely gone, I think to myself. You know that.
I do know that.
The strange thing is, I don't mind.
I spent forty-three years being a man who needed nothing.
Built an empire out of that need for nothing, made it a weapon, made it a reputation.
Axel Santego, who requires no one and can be moved by nothing.
Seven years in a cell confirmed it — I went in alone, came out the same way, and told myself that was strength.
Then Aurora walked into a club in a green dress and counted her failures out loud like they were interesting instead of shameful, and somewhere between that moment and this hospital ceiling, I stopped recognizing the man I used to be. The man who was trying to be a father to a demented boy.
And there it is.
The thing I've been circling for hours, every time I get close to it, my mind slides away, finding the ceiling crack or the IV line or Aurora's name to focus on instead. But the room is quiet, and there's nowhere to go, and it finds me anyway.
Leo.
I think about him at four years old, sitting in the back of my car with both small hands wrapped around a juice box, legs too short to reach the floor, looking out the window at the city like it was something that belonged to him. He decided early that things belonged to him.
I think about him at nine, bringing home a school report that was mostly failures, and instead of embarrassment he'd looked at me with this extraordinary calm and said the teacher doesn't like me. Not I didn't work hard enough. Not I'll do better. Someone else's fault. Always someone else.
I think about the boy he was before he became the man he is, and I try to find the moment it forked. The moment where different choices might have produced a different person. I look for it honestly, the way I look at everything, and the answer I keep arriving at is one I don't like.
There wasn't a moment.
He was always going to be this.
But I did my best with him.
And he spent eight months building a plan to hand me to the Volkovs.
The grief and the rage arrive together, the way they did earlier, and this time I let them stay.
Let them move through me properly, doing what they need to do.
The grief is real. Whatever Leo became, the boy I raised was real too, and losing him — the idea of him, the version I kept believing in despite the evidence — is a real loss.
Goodbye, I think. Not to the man who sold me out. To the four-year-old with the juice box. To the boy who existed before he chose what he was going to be.
Goodbye.
The door opens.
Luca walks in like he owns the room, which is how Luca walks into every room, shoulders first, filling the space before he's fully occupied it. He's still in his coat. His eyes find me immediately and whatever he was expecting, a man more diminished by a hospital bed perhaps, he adjusts fast.
He pulls the chair to the side of the bed and sits.
We look at each other.
Forty years of history in this silence. The first time we met, two young men who had no business being as confident as we were, shaking hands over a deal that should have gotten us both killed.
The years that followed. The things we built together, the things we buried together, the friendship that became the closest thing to brotherhood I've ever known.
All of it sitting here in this room, complicated and damaged and still, somehow, present.
"We have to talk," Luca says.
"We do," I grunt.
He leans forward, forearms on his knees. "How did it go? Aurora and you—" I start.
His whole body stiffens. "Don’t talk to me about my daughter —"
"That won't be possible." I cut him off. "She's the woman I love, Luca. And she'll be in every conversation now. That's not changing."
He makes a sound that isn't quite a scoff and isn't quite a laugh.
Silence.
"I miss my friend," I say. The words come out without the armor I intended to wrap them in, just plain and direct and true.
"I've missed him for seven years, and then some.” I look at Luca's face, at the lines of it that are older than I remember.
"I don't think we can go back to the way we were.
I know that. But I just wanted to say it. "
Luca is quiet for a long time.
His jaw works slightly. He looks at the floor, then back at me.
"What if we could?" he says.
Something shifts in my chest. "What?"
"What if going back is possible?" His voice is careful. Measured. "Under one condition."
I wait.
"Leave her." He says it simply, no cruelty in it, just a man making the terms of a negotiation clear. "Walk away from Aurora. End it. I'll have my friend back, and she'll have her father without conditions, and everyone goes back to where they were."
The room is very quiet.
I look down at my hands, the IV line, the bandaging visible at the edge of the hospital gown.
I think about it genuinely, the way he deserves me to think about it.
I turn it over completely. A world where Luca and I are what we were.
Where the friendship is intact. Where everything that cracked gets rebuilt.
Without Aurora.
I look back up at him.
"I'd rather die," I say.
Luca blinks. Genuinely startled, and Luca never gets startled. "You—"
"I mean it." My voice is steady. "I'd rather die than live in a world where I chose to leave her. That's not dramatics. That's just true."
He stares at me. Reading my face the way only a man who has known you for decades can read it, going past the surface straight to the architecture underneath.
"You really feel this strongly," he says slowly.
"I wish I didn't." Something almost like a laugh moves through me. "Believe me, there are days I wish I could look at her and feel nothing. My life would be considerably simpler." I shake my head. "But I do, Luca. God help me, I do."
He leans back. Crosses his arms. "If you could go back," he says. "Knowing everything from the start. Knowing who she was. Would you still—"
"If I'd known from the beginning she was your daughter?
" I don't hesitate. "I would have done everything in my power to stay away from her.
Everything. She deserved better than to be pulled into whatever this is.
" I hold his eyes. "But if I did everything right and still ended up here, still ended up feeling this way — I'd make the same decision.
Every time." A pause. "I can't imagine my life without her in it. I've tried. The picture doesn't form."
Luca looks at me for a long time.
"I'm sorry," I say. "For everything. I don't want this to be the thing that ends our decades of history. I know I might not deserve to ask that, but I'm asking. Because I love your daughter, and I want to love her without it costing her the people who matter to her."
The silence that follows is different from the ones before it. Thicker. Something moving underneath it.
Luca runs both hands through his hair, and for a moment, he looks tired in a way I recognize because I feel it too — the particular exhaustion of a man who has been fighting the wrong battle for too long and is only just realizing it.
"She loves you," he says finally. Quiet.
Almost reluctant. "I saw her face today.
That's not—" He stops. "My daughter doesn't do anything halfway.
When she loves someone, she loves them with everything she has, she always has, since she was this small.
" He holds a hand low to the ground. "If she says you deserve it. " He exhales. "Then you deserve it."
I stare at him.
"What does that mean?" I say carefully.
He looks almost pained. Luca, who negotiates with the composure of a man made of stone, looks almost pained by what he's about to say.
He runs his hand through his hair again.
"It means I don't know what I'm doing." The admission comes out rough.
"It means I'm a father who spent three months being proud and stubborn and wrong, and my daughter is in a hospital corridor because I wasn't there.
" His jaw tightens. "It means this is me deciding to stay in my daughter's life no matter what her love life looks like.
" He meets my eyes. "And this is me trying to protect the man she loves. " A beat. "And my friend."
Something happens in my chest that I have no name for.
He puts his hand out.
I look at it for one second — that hand, extended across everything that's happened, across seven years and blood and betrayal and a friendship that should by all accounts be dead.
I take it.
We shake, and Luca's grip is exactly what it always was, firm and certain and familiar, and something that has been broken for a very long time makes a sound like it might be considering otherwise.
He almost smiles. Almost.
"Let's end this," he says. "All of it. The Volkovs, Leo, every last piece of this." His voice drops into the register I remember from forty years of sitting across from him when the stakes were absolute. "My daughter and my grandchild deserve the safest world we can build for them."
I look at my oldest friend.
"I agree," I say.